Pages

The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

What's a Ricer? (And Why Do I Need One?)

Indispensable For Perfect Mashed
Potatoes

Holiday time is mashed potato time. And
when it comes to mashed potatoes, every day is a holiday. But so
often, homemade mashed potatoes are nothing to celebrate. Lumpy,
gluey, heavy mashed

potatoes turn up all too often on family tables
and it's usually because of either faulty technique or improper
equipment. Or both. I'm not going to delve too deeply into recipes or
technique here. That's a discussion for another time and place. But I
will address the topic of proper equipment.

“Okay,” you ask, “so what do I
need for equipment? I have a potato masher. What else is there?”
Actually, if you want perfect, light, fluffy mashed potatoes, a
traditional potato masher like the kind your mother, grandmother, and
probably your great-grandmother employed to mangle spuds into
submission is the last thing you need. And before you ask, that
electric hand mixer that makes lovely glue but lousy mashed potatoes
is the second-to-last thing you need. No, if you want to make 'em
right, you really need a ricer.

What's a ricer? It's the thing over
there on the right. “That looks like a big garlic press,” you
say. You're right. It does. And the operating principal is similar.
You take the food to be “riced” and put it in the hopper or bin
portion. There's a plate attached to the upper handle mechanism and
when you

squeeze the handles together, the food is forced through the
perforated grate in the bottom of the hopper. The resulting particles
are about the size and shape of a grain of rice, hence the name.

“And why, Professore Perfetto,
do I need one of these things to make 'perfect' mashed potatoes?”
Well, in order for your potatoes to come out light and fluffy in the
end, they have to start out that way in the beginning. When you
“rice” your potatoes, they come out light and fluffy because the
ricer a) helps force out excess moisture, b) produces a consistent
texture, and c) aerates the potato particles.

See, potatoes are made up of cells that
contain natural starch grains (leucoplasts). These are refined
starches with low gelatinization temperatures and high swelling
abilities. When you crush the cells, the starch is released. The
resulting substance is very sticky. So sticky, in fact, that it is
often used in the manufacturing of wallpaper paste. And the variety
of potato most popular for mashing is the Russet, a spud already
noted for its very high starch content. Now, you take a potato that's
high in starch and mash it to a starchy pulp and what do you get?
Wallpaper paste. With butter or gravy.

When you run a boiled potato through a
ricer, you're breaking the potato down into smaller pieces, but
you're not mashing the cells within those pieces into glue. If you
add your butter and milk to the riced potatoes and stir them gently
together, you'll get lighter, fluffier mashed potatoes. If, on the
other hand, you take chunks of boiled potato and mush them up with a
blunt instrument or subject them to beaters whirling at 1,200 RPM,
you're destroying the cells that contain the starches and allowing
those starches to be released in their stickiest, most gluey form.
Oh, you still get mashed potatoes out of the deal, but with a texture
more suited to spackling drywall than to serving as a side dish. It's
a matter of personal preference, I suppose. Some people like their
potatoes whipped to within an inch of their lives. They use words
like “smooth” and “creamy.” I use words like “overworked”
and “gooey.”

Ricers come in a variety of shapes and
sizes and are sold at a variety of price points. They all work on the
same principle, but some have holes in the bottom, some have holes in
the bottom and up the sides, and some have interchangeable disks that
allow you to choose the size of the holes. Some have ridiculously
small hoppers that will have you ricing the dinner potatoes at
breakfast so you can get a good start on them and some have hoppers
that would rice a five-pound bag of potatoes in one squeeze – if
you had the hand strength to operate it. I've seen them priced as low
as six or seven dollars and I've seen them sell for as much as forty
or fifty. Some are really basic and will do one job – ricing
potatoes – well. Others have features that allow them to be very
versatile and take on everything from applesauce to egg salad.

A food mill will perform the same
functions as a ricer. Food mills usually have interchangeable disks
and larger capacities so you can process more food more quickly. I
have one and I use it if I'm feeding a small army. But if I'm just
making mashed potatoes for two or four or six people, my ricer is
handier and has fewer moving parts. And it's easier to clean.

Now, if you're one of those folks who
makes “mashed potatoes” by pouring water into a bowl of
dehydrated potato flakes, you obviously don't need a ricer. But if
you want to quickly and efficiently turn out consistently good mashed
potatoes from scratch each and every time, you really should invest
in a ricer.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)